(blogging from the steps of Columbia University)
Will Kwan is a brilliant artist whom I have the pleasure of staying with while in New York City. I checked out his MFA Graduate exhibition at Columbia University.
His piece on view at this exhibition stems from an experience he had while going to the Federal Plaza in New York and being detained for five hours for taking photographs. After this experience, wherein his camera was confiscated and the images erased, he returned to the same spot to document the area using only his body – specifically his steps, one foot in front of the other, to map the area. This project took him about three months to complete. You can see an image of a detail of the map he created {{popup kwan.jpg kwan 600×450}}here. (Sorry about the image quality – it was taken with my camera phone.)
In addition to this map, he also produced a performance where he repeatedly kicked a soccer ball against the various locked gates present on the campus of Columbia University, and when a ball made it over the gate he left it there – as a “gift”, a reminder of his presence on the other side, and a public monument.
Will’s social sculptures give me lots to think about as I dive headlong into the PsyGeoConflux tomorrow.